Коротко
- Ad fraud is when you pay for clicks or visits with no real human interest behind them.
- Most often these are bots, scripts, fake traffic, and «empty» traffic from datacenters — the budget goes, there are no leads.
- ClikBy catches suspicious clicks on smart links: server-side bot signals, smart filtering, visit statuses.
- Then accumulated bot IPs and fbclid can be uploaded to Google Ads, Yandex.Direct, and Meta — if the account is connected.
In plain words
You launch ads and pay for a click or impression. A good scenario: a person saw the ad, clicked, looked at the offer, left a request or bought.
Fraud is when there is a click but essentially no person. Or there is a person, but they are not your customer and never meant to be: a competitor clicks ads, a click farm runs scripts, a bot «warms up» the publisher's stats. Money was charged — there is no result.
The industry often calls this invalid traffic / click fraud. The term matters less to us than the question: «was this click worth paying for?»
What fraud can look like
You do not need to memorize every classification. In practice a marketer more often sees this:
- Bots and parsers — programs with a characteristic User-Agent, without normal browser headers, headless tools.
- Datacenter traffic — clicks from server and hosting IPs, not from home/mobile networks.
- Frequency inflation — hundreds of clicks from one IP per minute: no live person browses ads that way.
- Empty and «technical» hits — prefetch, messenger preview bots, automatic link checks.
- Competitors and click farms — deliberate harm to the budget; the system sees them by the same technical traces, there is no separate «this is a competitor» button.
ClikBy does not put a label «competitor Ivanov». It records technical and behavioral signals and visit statuses — and you draw the conclusion about the source.
Why this hurts the business
- Budget burns on clicks without requests.
- Ad-system algorithms «learn» from junk and get worse at finding real buyers.
- The pixel and retargeting audiences get polluted — you then chase bots with ads.
- The client report looks good on clicks and terrible on money.
That is why it matters to look not only at CTR in the Ads account, but also at click quality after the click.
How ClikBy looks at this
When a person (or a bot) follows a smart link, ClikBy checks the request still on the server. Treated as suspicious, for example: empty User-Agent, a bot per detection libraries, headless/curl/Scrapy and similar patterns, missing Accept / Accept-Language, IPs from datacenter ranges, more than 30 clicks in 60 seconds from one IP.
Then, if smart filtering is on, the visit may go through the client SDK: delay, events, confirmation. Unconfirmed and clearly bot clicks should not feed your pixels the same way as a live confirmed visit.
In the account you see statuses like bot_server, pending, confirmed, bot_filter and can discuss quality with the client, not only «how many clicks the publisher drew».
Technical breakdown of signals: how fraud is detected. On modes and Selena — thresholds and modes.
Connection with ads accounts
Apart from «catching a bot on the link» there is a next step: telling the ad system whom it is better not to show again.
If you connected an account in Pulse → Ads, ClikBy can automatically:
- add fraud IPs to exclusions of Google Ads and Yandex.Direct campaigns;
- send Meta negative signals on bots' fbclid via Conversions API (FraudDetected event).
This is not a dispute with Google support «give the money back», but practical protection of subsequent impressions and optimization.
How to connect accounts step by step: connecting ads accounts.
What not to expect
- 100% protection «forever» — fraud changes, some traffic is gray.
- Automatic budget refund from Meta/Google/Yandex in ClikBy's name.
- That the «Ads» section will pull your spend and ROAS from the accounts into ClikBy — right now it is about uploading antifraud signals, not importing campaign statistics.
- That TikTok or LinkedIn already work as connectable accounts in this section — today automation exists for Google Ads, Meta (Facebook Ads), and Yandex.Direct.
An honest task: pay less for junk and collect audiences more cleanly. The rest is your media plans and talks with publishers.